Solidworks

If your flat pattern dimensions are wrong, the K-factor is usually why. But “set the K-factor” is the third step in a process that starts with understanding what K-factor is, what bend deduction is (they are different things expressed in different units), and — critically — knowing which of three separate places in SOLIDWORKS is actually controlling your flat pattern. K-Factor and Bend Deduction Are Not the Same Thing Both K-factor and bend deduction describe what happens to material during bending, but they describe it differently. ...

In Document Properties > Units, the Mass/Section Properties row has a Decimal Places dropdown. Pick any preset — 1, 2, 3 — and the drawing obeys immediately. Pick Custom and nothing visible happens. No input field. No dialog. No spinner. Just the dropdown label sitting there showing “Custom” with nowhere to type the actual number. This is a genuine SOLIDWORKS UI quirk that affects several versions. It is not a bug in your drawing or your template. ...

You have a sketch. You activate Insert > Weldments > Structural Member. You select the sketch lines. SOLIDWORKS either throws an error, silently omits some lines from the resulting bodies, or lets you finish — and the solid bodies pass through each other at every joint without trimming. None of these outcomes produces a clear error message that names the actual cause. This post covers every root cause and the diagnostic sequence to isolate which one is killing your structural members. ...

DWG and DXF come from the same software house and both describe 2D geometry, but they are not interchangeable. DWG is AutoCAD’s native binary storage format. DXF is a text-based exchange format designed so that non-Autodesk software can read AutoCAD data. That distinction has practical consequences for every engineer who exports flat patterns, sends files to fabricators, or receives drawings from a customer. What DWG Actually Is DWG was created by Mike Riddle in 1982, predating AutoCAD itself. Autodesk acquired the format when they acquired the early Interact CAD program. It is a binary file format — you cannot open it in a text editor and make sense of it. The internal structure has changed with every major AutoCAD release: ...

When you have two versions of the same part — the designed file and the manufactured sample, a supplier’s model and your original, or two revisions where you can’t find the delta — SOLIDWORKS has a built-in tool for exactly this. It overlays the geometry, highlights the differences, and produces a report. Most engineers have never seen it because it lives behind an add-in that is disabled by default. It is called Compare Geometry, and it is part of the SOLIDWORKS Utilities add-in. ...

SOLIDWORKS 2026 SP3.2 introduced a regression specific to the flat-pattern DXF export path: bend lines appear in the cleanup window preview, the Bend lines checkbox in the DXF/DWG Output PropertyManager is checked, yet the written DXF has no bend line entities whatsoever. The geometry exports fine. Layers are correct. But the press brake operators get a DXF with no fold marks. This is a distinct failure mode from the SP3 regression documented in the general bend lines troubleshooting guide. That post covers the mapping file regression (enable-flag rows silently cleared) and per-user registry mismatches. The SP3.2 bug is different: the mapping file is intact, the registry value is correct, the entity bitmask is correct — and the export still omits bend lines. ...

Generating SolidWorks drawings manually — open part, new drawing, place views, fill title block, insert BOM, save PDF — is fine for a handful of parts. At scale it becomes a bottleneck. The SolidWorks API exposes every step of that workflow, and a well-structured macro or add-in can generate complete drawing packages for an entire assembly in minutes. This post covers the full pipeline: creating drawing documents from a template, adding model views, populating title block annotations from custom properties, inserting BOMs, and exporting to PDF. Both VBA (for quick scripts) and C# (for production add-ins) approaches are shown. ...

A DXF file represents geometry in 2D — lines, arcs, splines, and circles with no thickness, no material, and no bend information. SOLIDWORKS’s sheet metal system represents a 3D part with folded geometry derived from a flat pattern governed by a K-factor and material thickness. The import workflow is about bridging those two representations, and there are three different paths depending on what you start with. What You’re Actually Working With Before choosing an approach, establish what the DXF contains: ...

Why BOM Cells Turn Blue When you manually edit a BOM cell in a SolidWorks drawing — typing directly into the cell to change a description, quantity, or part number — the cell background turns blue. This is intentional behavior, not a display bug. The blue indicates an override: the cell value is no longer driven by the corresponding model custom property. SolidWorks decouples the cell from the model the moment you type in it, and it marks that decoupled state visually so you (and anyone reviewing the drawing) know the value in the BOM doesn’t necessarily match what the 3D model says. ...

What SolidWorks Automation Actually Means “SolidWorks automation” gets used for everything from a 20-line VBA macro that renames a file to a full production-grade COM add-in that processes 10,000 parts a night. Those are not the same thing, and the gap between them is measured in months of development, not hours. This guide maps the territory. Four automation approaches cover almost everything teams do with SolidWorks programmatically. Each one has a ceiling. Knowing which ceiling you’re about to hit before you write code saves rebuilding the same solution twice. ...